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While the Kennedyassassi- nation and the civil-rights struggle per- colate at the edges of the story and in- form it, the change on which the play immediately focusses is the quarters, nickels, and dimes that Noah is forever leaving in his pockets. This chump change ends up being Caroline's wind- fall. When she finds the money in his laundry, she is instructed by Rose to take it. What was intended as a paren- tal lesson in financial responsibility is turned by Noah into a strategy of con- nection. "Caroline takes my money home! / Now I know what they talk about / at the Thibodeaux house, at suppertime," the boy sings. "Before it was a mystery. / Now they count my quarters and / they talk about me!" The coins become a paradigm of capital- ism: instead of buying Caroline's labor, Noah stumbles onto a way of buying her attention. In Wolfe's excellent stag- ing, Caroline's economic necessity is played off against Noah's emotional needs. Noah, the self-confessed "stoop- nagle" who fantasizes about being "N oah Thibodeaux," hilariously tries to join in the hand-jiving playground palaver of Caroline's two sons, Jackie and Joe (the adorable Kevin Ricardo Tate and Marcus Carl Franklin). The boys sing about Wonder Woman: "Stronger than anyone, six times as pretty / An eagle brassiere with a wing on each titty!" When Noah leaves a twenty-dollar Hanukkah dividend from his grand- father in his pants pocket and Caroline claims it, however, the master-servant relationship suddenly asserts itself. Noah demands his money back; in his panic, he blurts out a racist com- ment. Caroline gives him the money and a goodbye; in her humiliation, she walks off the job and stays away for five days. "That money reach in and spin me about / my hate rise up, rip my in- sides out," she sings in a sensational aria in which her pride fights a losing battle with her financial desperation. She can't afford to be out of work, but the price of survival is emotional death. In Pinkins's electrifying ren- dition, all the connotations of the word " h " h "D k h c ange come toget er: rOC et c ange change me, / can't afford loose change, can't afford change." In order to lose her anger, she has to lose her sense of self; to cauterize herself against disap- pointment, she kills her heart. "What else God give me an arm for?" she sings, disappearing before our eyes. "SLAM go the iron / SLAM go the iron. / FLAT! / FLAT! / FLAT! / FLAT!" The song is an act of psychic demolition. By the end of it, a deep detachment- "the muteness of slavery," Hurston called it-has fallen over Caroline like a permanent shadow. Although the conclusion of the show somewhat haphazardly suggests that Emmie will carry the example of her mother's steely will into the new ac- tivism of her generation, there is no up- beat future for Caroline. She has put herself beyond dreams. To the end, she is wary and stolid and clear-eyed. "Will we be friends then?" Noah asks her when she comes back to work. "Weren't never friends," she says. Caroline, like the show, pulls no punches. On an in- tellectuallevel, Noah may not under- stand the import of what Caroline says to him; on an emotional level, how- ever, they are bound together, wound to wound, as Caroline spells out: Someday we'll talk again But they's things we'll never say That sorrow deep inside you, It's inside me too, And it never go away. You be O.K. As Noah listens to Caroline's lit- any of losses, he asks wistfully, "Do you miss sharing a cigarette?" Car- oline answers with heartbreaking di- rectness: "You bet I do, Noah. / You bet, you bet." There are no hugs, no hands across the sea of cultural dif- ference, no sentimental gestures of re- dress, just a stunning acknowledgment of the chasm between the two charac- ters. Their worlds are negotiable, Kush- ner makes clear, but not bridgeable. "Caroline, or Change" gives the incon- solable a mature song, illuminating both worlds without condescending to either. .